Egyptian Marriage in Context

In Foreign Policy, Ursula Lindsey reviews Hanan Kholoussy's For Better, For Worse: The Marriage Crisis That Made Modern Egypt about an alleged "marriage crisis" in Egypt during the early 20th century:

"What she (Kholoussy) does do is show how marriage -- viewed by Egypt's small, newly educated, emerging middle class as a 'microcosm of the nation" -- can become a focal point for discussing wider economic concerns, cultural changes, and political demands. In the first three decades of the 20th century, Egypt's economy was battered by a series of crises, including a drop in the price of cotton, World War I, and the Great Depression. Inflation was rampant, and many complained -- like Abaza -- that they could not afford to marry. Men were expected (just as they are today) to provide their new bride with an independent home, to support her in a style commensurate with her upbringing, and to pay a dowry that could be several times their yearly salary.

"Some observers blamed women and their families for their exorbitant demands; others blamed bachelors for squandering their money at coffeehouses or with prostitutes. Writers in Egypt's burgeoning national press wondered whether the problem wasn't the lack of educated women, capable of being proper mates; others claimed that it was precisely women's education -- their new, forward, Western ways -- that deterred men from marriage. Critics suggested legislating a maximum, affordable dowry and levying a tax on bachelors.

"At the time, Egypt was under British control, and the debate was framed in nationalist terms. The male ability to establish an independent household was seen as paralleling the Egyptian need to establish independence from colonial rule. To marry was a patriotic duty. 'A man who does not marry is like a deserter from the army,' wrote one prominent columnist quoted in Kholoussy's book. Highlighting the marriage crisis was a way to critique British rule and foreign capitalists' control of the economy. It also expressed Egyptian men's anxieties regarding their future and their degree of control -- both over the country and over their rapidly changing female compatriots."

Lindsey, an astute cultural observer, links the book to perceptions of a "marriage crisis" in Egypt today. The article is well worth reading, as are the on-line exchanges posted at Arabist.

Absheron Peninsula

Today, this is the landscape of Azerbaijan's Absheron Peninsula, the legacy of the Soviet Union's oil industry.

Rafsanjani's Reward

Geneive Abdo reports on what may be motivating Rafsanjani's rapprochement with Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamene'i:

"In exchange for Rafsanjani's loyalty, the supreme leader appears to have given him power over a new bill that will establish a National Elections Commission to reform the electoral process. Not only is this issue at the heart of Iran's political crisis, but the commission would also determine the eligibility of individuals to stand as candidates in elections. And the Expediency Council, which monitors legislation and is responsible for any conflicts that might result over Iranian laws, will also decide the members who serve on the National Elections Commission.

"This significant change in the elections process will greatly reduce the power of the Guardian Council, a body of six hard-line clerics and six jurists appointed by Khamenei. Historically, this Guardian Council has banned many reformist candidates from running in elections, thus ensuring conservative control even in the face of growing public discontent. The guardians were also charged with hearing complaints about election fraud and complaints from banned candidates contesting their exclusion. Now, the National Elections Commission will hold some of these responsibilities."

Missionaries in Morocco

Morocco has suddenly begun expelling Christian missionaries whom it accuses of proselytizing:

"The largest incident took place at an orphanage for 33 abandoned children in the Middle Atlas mountains on Monday. Moroccan police showed up in the village of Ain Leuh, located 50 miles south of the ancient city of Fez, and separated orphans from their adoptive parents before delivering a grim piece of news: the Moroccan authorities had accused the volunteers of spreading Christianity – a crime in this overwhelmingly Muslim nation...

"But the expelled volunteers from Village of Hope orphanage insist they were operating within the law.

"'The fact of the matter is we weren’t proselytizing,' says Chris Broadbent, a New Zealander who managed the orphanage’s office until Monday, when he and his family fled to Spain. 'We understood the rules.'

"At the orphanage school, the children spoke Moroccan Arabic, studied the Koran, and learned Muslim prayers as stipulated by Moroccan law, Mr. Broadbent says. Outside of the classroom, it’s true Christians were raising the children in Christian households, but Broadbent says this was a fact about which no Moroccan official could pretend to be surprised."

Jillian York also has a round-up of reactions at Global Voices Online. Much discussion centers on whether the aid workers were teaching Christianity or evangelizing under the cover of charity work. My suspicion, however, is that the conflict comes from the ambiguity of such concepts in modern western Christianity.

Right now, I'm living in a very conservative, Christian area. Active involvement in religious organizations is the single biggest non-college commitment of Shippensburg University students. Many businesses have Christian music as their background motif, and discussion of religion is everywhere. Because of this, I meet a lot of people who are interested in missionary work, or at least hear about it and know what it is supposed to be.

Perhaps the best example of the point I want to get at came when I started discussing Spanish missionaries in the Americas at the end of World History I last semester. Shippensburg students often have very weak vocabularies, so at one point I asked the class to explain what "missionary" meant. The first answer I got was, "Someone who goes somewhere to show an example of Christian living." Specifically, this entails living for others by participating in the sorts of charity projects discusses in the Morocco pieces.

I meet a lot of college-aged and other young people who are interested in this kind of thing, or have done it themselves. To me, it seems clear that this form of missionary activity channels the same internationally focused idealism that joining the Peace Corps or those sorts of volunteer organizations does in more liberal areas. The impulses really are the same, people around here just tie it to religion because that's the culture in which they were raised.

The ambiguity in all this comes up in how this ties into other concepts of missionary activity, particularly the direct and unambiguous proselytizing most people think of when they hear the word. The fact is, in theory of going somewhere to represent a Christian way of life, however defined, is to attract others to Christianity by example. The degree to which this is actually on an individual's mind varies from case to case, of course, but it's definitely in the background of a lot of these projects.

You can see how this creates a gray area for laws against proselytizing. It gets even more complicated when people talk about their religion with others. But how does one legislate a line where active proselytizing blends into just being whatever you think a good Christian should be and then talking to people who are interested in the religion within which you're operating? The role of children in this is one thing, but at that point, you're close to building a theological Berlin Wall around your population to keep them within the fold rather than just trying to control the behavior of outsiders within your country.

I should say that, while running around trying to convert people to your religion doesn't seem like a great use of energy, I also don't think it should actually be illegal. However, given the motives and laws among various groups around the world are what they are, I suspect the ambiguities above are what lead to many of these conflicts.

(Crossposted to American Footprints)

Techno-Nomadism

At the end of the day, people become nomads because it is the most efficient use of ecological resources. For that reason, this isn't that surprising:

"Several tribes still lead nomadic lives in the outskirts of Rub Al Khali that covers about a third of the Arabian Peninsula. There are several rich oil fields of Saudi Arabia located in this desert.

"There is little vegetation and animal life in these regions. Still, in between there are pockets allowing some vegetation and animal life. The high-tech revolution that brought about an incredible transformation of human life in the modern world is not alien to the nomadic tribes living in these remote desert regions...

"During the visit to a pocket of the Bedouin tribe of Shammar, I encountered a young man called Ahmad Al Shammari. He was seen using a laptop while herding camels and sheep. He was letting his herd graze while sitting in his small Hilux pick-up vehicle, browsing the internet."

Gulf Christianity and Early Islam

One strong example of how archaeology, once developed in an area over time, can make crucial contributions to our understanding of the past is Robert Carter's 2008 article in Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy entitled "Christianity in the Gulf during the first centuries of Islam." The most common type of archaeological dating is through pottery. Pottery runs in styles that evolve over time and occasionally change abruptly, meaning that if you find some pottery that you can confidently date, such as something found in a dated grave or in stratified layer between two other types of pottery which have been confidently dated, you can then attribute other excavated contexts that have that pottery to the same period. Over time, archaeologists develop a fairly strong picture of the pottery assemblages which were common in different periods.

Carter's article concerns the dating of Christian remains in the Gulf, which are mainly associated with the Church of the East, also called the Assyrian or Nestorian church. Its influence in the Gulf is well known from written sources, though after 676 there is no record of its bishopric of Bet Qatraye in northeastern Arabia. Conventional views hold that the Gulf region quickly became Muslim after that period.

Much of the article concerns a monastery on the island of Sir Bani Yas, in the western part of the emirate of Abu Dhabi. Although the island is remote by land, sea travel was easier anyway, and the monastery faced toward the sea. Following the evidence of the texts, it has long been assumed to date to the Sasanian period before the coming of Islam. Over the past 15 years or so, however, archaeologists have learned a great deal more about the differences in pottery assemblages between different periods of late antiquity and early Islam, and these form the key element in Carter's argument that the monastery actually flourished during the late 7th and early 8th centuries.

From there Carter discusses several other Christian sites, noting that a church at al-Qusur on Failaka island in Kuwait probably dates to the late 8th and 9th centuries and an extensive monastery on Kharg, an island off the coast of Iran in the upper Gulf, was almost certainly found in the 9th century, or perhaps the late 8th. All of this poses several problems. One is the lack of secure dating of Christian sites to the Sasanian period, when the written sources say it should be there, though as Carter notes they may have been built of perishable materials, if they are not simply undiscovered. I consider some combination of those two most likely. In either case, what we see happening is a significant Christian building program, something also attested to near Mosul. Carter quote a letter of Patriarch Isho'yahb III which testifies to the good relations between Christianity and Islam during the mid-7th century:

"There Arabs, to whom God for the time being has given the Empire of the world, are also, as you know, very close to us; and not just because they do not attack the Christian religion, but they praise our faith, honour the priests and the saints of the Lord and award benefits to the churches and monasteries."

The bigger issue is why the region disappears from the written sources, except for a few scattered mentions in saints' lives. Its final appearance in 676 comes when Patriarch George I tries to end a schism in which the Bet Qatraye region tried to withdraw from the Church of the East and go its own way. Carter's suggestions are either that George I failed and they did secede altogether, or he was successful in a way that meant they no longer attended synods or required close patriarchal attention. Either way, thanks to this research, we now have a clear picture of a thriving Christian community found on Gulf islands and some port cities, heavily involved in pearling, and probably with at least some form of autonomy from the Mesopotamia-based Patriarchs.

Conversion and Acculturation

When I taught the Ottoman Empire survey at Colgate University last spring, the best discussion we had was easily the one over a chapter in Anton Minkov's Conversion to Islam in the Balkans dealing with the "forms, factors and motives" of conversion. A highlight was when one girl said that the issues with religious conversion in that reading reminded her of the assimilation of minority communities to the dominant culture of the United States she was studying in another class on race in the U.S.

I thought of this again while reading Tamer el-Leithy's "Coptic Culture and Conversion in Medieval Cairo, 1293-1524 A.D.," which in 2005 received Honorable Mention for MESA's Malcolm H. Kerr Dissertation Award. A study of the major waves of conversion during the Mamluk sultanate,it begins with a discussion of the martyrdom story of John of Phanijoit, who converted from Christianity to Islam, and then went back to Christianity and was executed despite the attempts of Muslim authorities to spare him. As el-Leithy says:

"More generally, the martyrology presents John's conversion to Islam as a progression, a social process rather than a religious event, the culmination of John's 'mixing' with Muslims. Cairo was the primary locus of this insidious social contact between Copts and Muslims - 'the place of net-snaring entrapment, the path of stumbling' - contact that always bore the latent threat of conversion."

A important trend in medieval Middle Eastern social history is to ascribe more agency to non-Muslim communities under Islamic rule, and el-Leithy does so in the matter of conversion. For example, early on, he discusses women who convert to escape slavery or unwanted marriages to non-Muslims. Near the end, however, is when el-Leithy most directly deals with what could be called acculturation, as practices accepted by Islam but not by Coptic Christianity, such as concubinage, polygyny, and divorce, became commonly practiced by Copts who lived in close proximity with Muslims. (El-Leithy's terminology is "cultural convergence.") Furthermore, any Christian or Jew could appeal to Muslim courts to have their affairs decided under shari'a, and with four schools of Islamic law to choose, from, "court shopping" became a regular practice in all manner of affairs. As el-Leithy says on this point:

"The more such Copts became integrated into Muslim society and law, the less likely they were to remain Christian. Even should such Copts remain officially Christian, Coptic law retained only a partial hold on their desires, possibilities and practices: their Christianity was as superficial as that nominal Islam of which older Muslim authors accused Coptic converts."

El-Leithy discusses this mainly through the correspondence of Patriarch Yuhanna XIII, who reigned from 1483-1524, but frequent supporting evidence from other sources, particularly Cairo Geniza documents from the 11th and 12th centuries, indicates that situation was not new, and probably forms an important element of the environment which made possible the massive conversion waves in response to Mamluk pressures and enticements.

Tantawi Dies

This morning saw the death of Sheikh Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, head of al-Azhar University, considered the world's foremost seat of Sunni Islamic learning. Issandr El Amrani has an excellent overview of his career:

"Tantawi leaves a mixed legacy behind him: overall, the immediate verdict may be that he was too liberal for conservatives, too conservative for liberals, too compliant with the regime for those who want al-Azhar to be independent, and too independent for those in the regime who needed Azharite support to enact policy changes on issues as varied as Palestine, banking and TV game shows. The overall image is of a man besieged on all sides, but adept at fighting bureaucratic battles in the bloated, clerical civil service that al-Azhar has become."

The whole piece is worth reading for its detail and local insight. As a historian, of course, I'm interested in what the Tantawi era meant for al-Azhar's development as an institution. El Amrani touches upon this:

"He leaves behind an unreformed al-Azhar — an institution that includes a university and a school system as well as a theological center — whose credibility has hit rock-bottom. This may be because Tantawi was too pliant towards the regime, or because of the growth of various trends in contemporary Islam that reject al-Azhar's centrality. While the Muslim Brothers dream of restoring al-Azhar to its former (imagined?) glories, Salafists and groups like the Quranists would do away with its mediation of religion altogether. The debate over al-Azhar and the trahison des clercs is far from over. Whoever replaces him — perhaps Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa, another tentative modernizer — will have much work to repair al-Azhar's standing and its vitality as a place of learning. It will also have to make difficult political decisions, especially on the issue of presidential succession, at a time when clerics are beginning to voice an opinion on the prospect of a Gamal Mubarak presidency."

I suspect that the standard interpretation will be that Tantawi was the regime's man by Midan Husayn. He was essentially Mubarak's agent as Egypt's Chief Mufti, and his reformist views should be seen in that light - not that they were necessarily insincere, but simply that they were what the regime wanted and Tantawi saw nothing wrong with allying himself with the government. This alliance, of course, may in some circles have hurt his message's credibility as well as his own.

When I think of al-Azhar, however, I think beyond Egypt. I've seen Al-Azhar called the "Sunni Muslim Vatican," but that's a terrible analogy, as no formalized hierarchy establishes its position. A better analogy would be an Islamic Harvard in a tradition that emphasizes religious learning. Its status is based on multiple perceived indicators which are not necessarily directly tied to the quality of the education one gets there. Yet just as a Harvard degree carries cachet regardless of higher education gossip about the quality of the ivies vis a vis, say, the top tier of liberal arts schools in the U.S. Walking around al-Azhar, you can't help but notice students from throughout the Muslim world, who will return to their countries with the prestige of an al-Azhar degree.

Of course, El Amrani is right that an assault on the ulama's privileged authority in religious interpretation has been a key element of both liberal and conservative Islamic reform movements throughout the world since the 1800's. In her excellent 1999 International Journal of Middle East Studies article "Religion and Politics in Egypt: The Ulema of al-Azhar, Radical Islam, and the State (1952-94)," Malika Zeghal addressed some shifts in the construction of religious education, but didn't really tackle of extent to which Azhari claims to continued authority were accepted by the Egyptian public, much less how the issues with its administration and politicization have affected its stature around the world. The experiences of its students and their affect on their own communities are as much a part of al-Azhar in the world as is its moral authority in the Nile Valley.

(Crossposted to American Footprints)

Iraq for the Iraqis

Marc Lynch notes a more important aspect of Iraqi politics:

"The other main headline of the Iraqi election campaign has to be the overwhelmingly nationalist tone of all major politicians and the marginal American role in the process. The election campaign (as opposed to the results, which we still don't know) showed clearly that Iraqis are determined to seize control of their own future and make their own decisions. The U.S. ability to intervene productively has dramatically receded, as the Obama administration wisely recognizes. The election produced nothing to change the U.S. drawdown schedule, and offered little sign that Iraqis are eager to revise the SOFA or ask the U.S. to keep troops longer. Iraq is in Iraqi hands, and the Obama administration is right both to pay close attention and to resist the incessant calls to 'do more.'"

Khomeinism in Iraq

Two posts I read today hint at some degree of increased strength for Khomeinist theories of government in Iraqi politics. First there is Juan Cole:

"Ammar has a say in who serves as the Friday Prayer leader and sermonizer at the mosque of the shrine of Ali in the holy city of Najaf, a position of great influence. It is now held by Sayyid Yasin al-Musawi. Al-Musawi's sermon on last Friday in Najaf contained a number of themes that suggest that ISCI may be returning to its Khomeinist roots. Al-Musawi praised political obedience to the Shiite grand ayatollahs, not just spiritual obedience. That sounded close to the Khomeinist principle of the guardianship of the jurisprudent, or rule of the ayatollahs, which prevails in Iran. And he warned of conspiracies against Iraqi independence, saying that these conspiracies were launched by 'global arrogance and the secularists.'"

The Ammar in question is Ammar al-Hakim, leader of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq. The other post comes from Reidar Visser:

"Among the more overlooked aspects of the Iraqi parliamentary elections that take place on Sunday is the fact that Kazim al-Haeri, a hardliner cleric of Iraqi origin residing in Qum in Iran, enthusiastically supports participation.

"Haeri belongs to a particular class and generation of Shiite scholars: He is an old-school Khomeinist. Always loyal to the paradigm of wilayat al-faqih, he has written extensive treatises on the inviolability of the power of the supreme leader, not only inside Iran but throughout the Shiite world. He remained supportive of such views when Khamenei emerged as Khomeini’s successor in the first half 1990s; after 2003 he has formed an important (if not always stable) bridge between Iranian leaders and the Sadrists of Iraq. In this role, Haeri forms the juncture where orthodox Khomeinism and radical Sadrism of southern Iraq meet, and where Tehran has found its best vantage point for domesticating radical Iraqi trends and transforming them into tools of its own interests."

I note this without comment.

(Crossposted to American Footprints)

The Land of Enki

The Summer 2009 Review of Middle East Studies included a review by Fred Lawson of Mills College of The Land of Enki in the Islamic Era: Pearls, Palms, and Religious Identity, written by Timothy Insoll with contributions from Robert Carter, Ian Smith, Eden Hutchins, and Mark Beech, a scholarly monograph springing from the excavation of the site of Bilad al-Qadim in Bahrain. The review's second sentence is, "Archaeologists tend to pose questions that are impossible to answer, given the nature of the evidence with which they work." Although I have some sympathy for that perspective with regards to "religious identity," and am skeptical of the concept of the "archaeology of Islam" advocated elsewhere by Insoll and which he seeks in places to apply here, I felt as I was reading that although Lawson is actually a political scientist, his review expressed much of what I sometimes hear historians say about archaeology and its potential for improving our understanding of the past.

Lawson frequently expresses disappointment with the lack of clear conclusions. This, I think, misunderstands the nature of this book. A key difference between archaeology and history is that the former requires more methodological sophistication to extract the primary source material, and that this extraction inevitably destroys much of the usable information. Further, artifacts are unique and cannot be reproduced. Because of this, an archaeological monograph reporting on a single excavation is often not so much a book comparable to historical monographs, but more like an edited chronicle with an introduction, footnotes, and perhaps some analysis in the back.

No historian of medieval Europe would deny the contributions archaeology has made to that field, particularly with regards to social and economic history. This contribution, however, depends upon a significant amount of information, information which remains missing for the Middle East after the rise of Islam. In discussing Chapter 10, on "Trade, Exchange, and Related Processes," Lawson laments Insoll's admission that "little permission is permitted" in explaining the complexities of Bilad al-Qadim's trade connections. Yet a key point is noted in the first paragraph of the end of chapter summary:

"Yet compiling this table only serves to indicate that much of what has been reconstructed is provisional in nature, pending further research both on the materials from Bilad al-Qadim, but also further fieldwork in the regions described; most pressingly within the Gulf itself, allied with the urgent publication of sites already investigated, though exceptions such as Siraf and Kush exist. It is emphasized that it is not presented here as the definitive reconstruction of trade either from Bilad al-Qadim or the Arabian Gulf, far from it. It is merely a presentation of some of the available data allied with a degree of speculation as to what this might signify."

In other words, the conclusions are tentative because to a great extent they address questions that cannot be addressed with what little evidence is available thus far. In the next chapter, for example, Insoll has interesting ideas on possible ways to recognize Carmathian sites archaeologically. In order to go anywhere with them, however, one has to have a bunch of excavated Carmathian sites and see what pops up. In the meantime, Insoll and his colleagues make their work available so others can easily access it, and to prevent historians like me from grousing about how archaeologists never publish their findings.

Ultimately, too, as with any discipline, archaeology's strengths won't strike everyone as interesting or important. In all periods before modernity, for example, it is the best, if not the only, way to get at concrete daily life, especially for non-elite communities. It can also move our understanding of economic environments past the usually impressionistic views of the literary sources. Derek Kennet's article "The decline of eastern Arabia in the Sasanian period" is an example of the latter, one made possible by information from a number of sites around the region, all of which served to shed light on each other. Insoll's book is ultimately an entry into that kind of conversation, interesting for what it suggests, but important for the use others can make of it.

The New IRP

Tajikistan's Islamic Renaissance Party makes for an interesting comparison with Islamist political parties in the Arab world:

"The IRP, the only officially registered Islamic party in Central Asia, has in the past depended heavily on support in the country's conservative east -- particularly Rasht Valley, the wartime stronghold of the Islamic opposition fighters. Today, the party boasts an increasing number of followers in other regions, including Kulob and Sughd, traditionally dominated by the pro-presidential party.

"The IRP broadened its support base in a number of ways. First, it sought to shed its image, cultivated since its founding in 1990, as a rural party followed by mullahs and religious conservatives. By replenishing its aging ranks, the party has made itself more appealing to intellectuals, businessmen, and students. Most of the IRP's candidates in the upcoming elections are in their 30s and 40s, and they include lawyers, teachers, entrepreneurs, and at least one professional sportsman...

"Unlike the publicity-shy Nuri, who wore a dark beard and donned a long cloak at official meetings, the clean-shaven Kabiri comes across as media-savvy, outspoken, and dynamic...

"Kabiri has sought support outside the party's traditional base -- making it his goal to appeal to young and educated Tajiks, including women."

One commonality I see is the desire to broaden appeal in exactly the ways mentioned. The political context is different, however, in that the government has made no attempt at co-option. In fact, it seems more interested in the Turkish model, as are its Central Asian neighbors.

Ariel Sharon

Ariel Sharon is still biologically alive in Israel's Sheba Medical Center.

I just thought I'd note that fact.

Acre

The historic town of Acre, in northern Israel

Terror in Texas

I agree with every single line in this post:

"I’m not especially interested in debating semantics, but I think it’s very clear that if this had been done by a brownish-looking Muslim guy whose suicide note paralleled Islamist political themes that the right wing would be pissing its pants and demanding that anyone who refused the label the attack 'terrorism' be put up on treason charges. But the new rules seem to be that politically motivated violence when undertaken by white people isn’t terrorism...

"The key point, that all authorities seem to agree on, is that while this is a serious crime and a genuinely Bad Thing To Have Happen, that you need to put the likelihood of this sort of incident into a broader context. Simply put, the odds of 'death by disgruntled anti-tax activist flying an airplane into your office' are extremely small and it’s extremely difficult to think of cost-effective and efficacious methods of ensuring that this never happens again...

"Stack’s stated purpose for undertaking the attack was to try to prompt a counterproductive overreaction: 'I would only hope that by striking a nerve that stimulates the inevitable double standard, knee-jerk government reaction that results in more stupid draconian restrictions people wake up and begin to see the pompous political thugs and their mindless minions for what they are.' It’s smart, then, that as a country we’re responding to his terrorism by trying to avoid counterproductive overreactions. But of course this is also Osama bin Laden’s goal and it’s also appropriate to respond to Islamist political violence in a similar spirit."